


way down we go

by absention



Category: Emmerdale
Genre: Aftermath of Seizure, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Head Injury, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-07 21:34:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15916701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/absention/pseuds/absention
Summary: It starts with a tremor.(or, Robert copes the best way he knows how, which is to say, he doesn’t cope at all.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Avoiding spoilers is a bit like dodging a bullet, in this fandom, but nevertheless: **warning for spoilers through the 14th ahead** to those who’ve managed and are still avoiding them.
> 
> Canon compliant up until the 6th, and will likely diverge from it in the coming week. I am not going to pretend I have a clue what the writers are thinking when I barely know what they’re thinking as I actually watch things unfold on screen, but I’m assuming the fit is a one-off and ultimately a consequence of a head injury made worse by stress (high blood pressure is a known cause of seizures) and exhaustion. Everything else is pure speculation based only on vague spoilers and a guessing game.
> 
> Title from the Kaleo song of the same name.

It starts with a tremor.

It starts with the headache, really, but the headache, he expects.

Robert doesn’t think much of it. He remembers unsteady hands a year ago, with Aaron behind bars and the world seemingly falling apart in the wake of his absence as Robert scrambled to hold all the fractured pieces together. Not quite panic, but—it could have been a number of things, really. Lack of sleep, everything feeling heavy even when he’d managed a couple of hours on the sofa, the coffees he’d had to keep down just to get through a day, the headaches.

It’s nothing he can’t ignore.

  
  
  
  
  


Half-eight brings another splitting headache and with it the feeling of being under a microscope, Aaron’s eyes roaming over Robert’s face for longer than Robert is comfortable with as he’s handed a fresh brew. Attention from his husband is normally a thrill, even after all this time, but not when Robert is just barely holding it together and Aaron can read him better than Robert can read himself sometimes.

Back for all of a day, and already Robert is ruining his time back like he’d ruined their trip with a delayed phone call, practically handing over a silver platter of reasons for Aaron to fret.

“Alright?” Aaron asks, but Robert knows from the downturn of his mouth that Aaron already knows the answer, probably expecting a front.

It’s tempting, the instinctual _fine_. Robert settles for a half-truth instead, remembering the promises they’d made to be honest. “Tired.”

Aaron scoffs. “You look it.” His face softens when Robert stifles a yawn, and Robert can’t help but lean into it when Aaron brushes his fingers through Robert’s hair. Call him soft, but Aaron’s hands feel like home. All of Aaron does. “Reckon that happens, when you don’t sleep.”

Robert can’t, is the thing, too many thoughts racing about in his head, a mile a minute.

He thinks of how paralyzed he’d felt in that barn, thinking back three years previous to a different gun, a different finger on the trigger, a different vendetta out for his blood. He thinks of sons growing up without their mothers, how he wouldn’t wish it on a soul: not Seb, not even Lachlan ( _Lachlan_ , God forbid, who killed his own after all). He thinks of Liv passed out on the floor of the Mill, of Chrissie white as a sheet in that wreckage, of Rebecca clawing desperately at memories slipping through fingers like sand. He thinks of Gerry buried under all that rubble, of Belle lying on the side of the road.

There isn’t the _time_ , even when he can manage to push everything aside for a fleeting second.

Robert shrugs one shoulder, staring down at the steam wafting out of the mug to avoid meeting Aaron’s eyes.

“Rob,” says Aaron tiredly. Robert expects a sigh, a pointed look towards the stairs as a silent message to take himself to bed, a fight about how Robert ought to stop being a bloody hypocrite and take care of himself. There’s a heavy pause, but all that comes is a warm hand on top of his. “You know you can talk to me, yeah?”

Robert forces himself to meet Aaron’s eyes, and he almost regrets it the second he sees doubt. The guilt almost swallows him whole right then, because he’d sworn up and down he’d never put that look on Aaron’s face, hadn’t he? Not again. But this—he can’t put _this_ on Aaron. The weight of it is almost crushing him and he doesn’t want to put that on Aaron’s shoulders. _Won’t_ put that on Aaron’s shoulders. He’d shouldered more than what was fair, last year, and look where that’d gotten the both of them.

He can’t stand Aaron doubting himself, but he thinks—selfishly—he’d hate it more if Aaron doubted _him_. Just the mere thought makes him go cold.

“I know,” Robert says steadily, because he does. Robert trusts Aaron with all the ugly parts, all the broken parts, all the vulnerable parts of him he’d never trust in any other hands. If just her name didn’t cash such a shadow, Robert might be an open book about this, too. “I’ll sleep better when this mess is sorted.”

“Not yours to sort, though, is it?” It’s Robert’s turn to give Aaron a sharp look, and Aaron relents and gives him this, at least: “Not _just_ yours.”

But it is.

It _is_.

  
  
  
  
  


Once upon a time, the Whites could have been considered normal. Oh, shady, still, and conniving, absolutely. But they’d taken family holidays to Spain and gathered around one of those unnecessarily long tables for at least one proper family meal every week. And then Robert had waltzed into their big, fancy kingdom and romanced the rightful heir to Lawrence’s empire.

Chrissie had loved him.

And after crossed paths and a whirlwind affair, Rebecca had loved him.

Lawrence had hated him for a lot of it, but underneath his initial doubts and later animosity, he had respected Robert, had fancied Robert, had maybe loved Robert as much as his daughters, every bit the fool Robert had played him for.

Lachlan had—well, Lachlan had never _loved_ him, but he hadn’t always hated him. Robert could have said the same of him, once. Like when Lachlan—younger, smaller, but not by much—had stood his full height to seem more intimidating than he’d actually been as he’d warned Robert off, more protective than vindictive, then.

“You know, I love your mom,” Robert had told him, and God, he’d loved the money, the promises of everything that came with it, but he’d meant it: he’d loved Chrissie and her cunning ideas and how she could mirror back his cocksure smile with cherry red lips that often tasted of wine.

Pleased, but trying not to show it, Lachlan had said, “You better.”

In the here and now, Robert thinks, _What happened?_

A nasty, vicious part of him that makes him recoil answers back, _You did_.

  
  
  
  
  


Any rational thought goes flying out the window when he sees the shrine in the village. It’s as if a switch is flipped and—

He is fourteen all over again, watching a barn go up in flames with his mother trapped inside.

He is six, sat on his dad’s knee, staring up wide-eyed at his parents as they explain that he’d had another mother— _biological_ , his dad says, careful to avoid the word real, eyes on his mum, gentler in the moment than Robert will remember him later on—and that an accident had taken her when he’d been four months old.

He is thirty-one and terrified of his son becoming a reflection of him: motherless before he can do much more than babble, motherless when only a mother’s touch can fix something, motherless and resenting his father enough to wish it were him instead of her.

He is thirty-five going on thirty-six, then thirty-eight, then nearing forty, mulling over all the while when Seb will be too young or too old for the news that will chip away at his soul bit by tiny bit with every passing day, for the gory details, for the history that came before all of that.

 _He is thirty-two and helplessly watching on as history repeats itself_.

Robert tears himself away from Aaron’s hands, unthinking, ignoring his pleas, the warning call of his name, the brush of fingers as Aaron reaches desperately for him again. His hands are shaking, _won’t stop bloody shaking_ , but even after all this time, it’s second nature, this: destroying things. Picking something carefully constructed apart to make everything hurt a little less for himself.

The shrine is a pathetic excuse for one.

It takes hardly any time at all to strip it down to nothing.

  
  
  
  
  


“They don’t even know she’s dead,” he spits, later, in the quiet of the Mill.

Aaron’s eyes are softer than Robert deserves. “I know.”

No judgment, no pity, no anger at the outburst—Robert isn’t sure if that makes him feel better or worse.

It’s just another thing that keeps him up that night.

  
  
  
  
  


The police have decided they’re looking for a body instead of a missing person. _Presumed dead_ , they say. _Homicide_ , they say. If the world as he knew it wasn’t already going up in flames, Robert might strike a match and set it alight himself. It’s little more than a gut feeling, that Rebecca is alive, but the last time he’d had a gut feeling, it’d been about Lachlan, and he’d hit the nail on its head. Look where it’d gotten the lot of them when he’d dropped it, let his guard down like everyone else who’d naively bought the act.

“Robert,” Aaron sighs from the door. Robert knows the tone well. It’s the one they reserve for when they’re not actively trying to pick a fight but know things will kick off regardless. He should know; he’s used it plenty. “You need to—” He seems to rethink his approach, shaking his head. “You look shattered. Sit down for a bit, will you?”

“And what would you have me do? Nothing?”

Aaron frowns, taken aback. “Of course not. I know—”

“You know what, exactly?” Robert cuts in, seething. The words rush up and out of him like bile. Now that he’s started, he can’t seem to stop. “You know what it feels like, do you?” _To lose a mother, to carry that with you for the rest of your life, to wish so fiercely for just a moment more with her, to be haunted by visions of a corpse you’ve never actually seen_.

His mind cuts away to another thought suddenly, dizzyingly. Lately, when it hasn’t been moving at the pace of a snail, his head has been all over the place, bouncing from one thing to the next before Robert has the time to process, too tired or too winded or too overwhelmed to keep up. Anger has been the only constant besides the bone-deep tiredness he can’t seem to shake, and Robert focuses on it in the vain hope it will center him.

“I’m sure you’d be glad if she was. _Dead_.”

No. _No_ , he wouldn’t. And Robert _knows_ it.

If anyone would be within their rights to, it’d be him, but of course he isn’t. Aaron is the most selfless person he knows. Recklessly so, sometimes.

Understandably, Aaron’s face hardens. “Go on, then. You’re so good at deciding how I’m meant to be feeling. Tell me more.”

How can he, when he can barely parse through the mess of his own emotions?

 _I’m sorry_ , he doesn’t say. _I’m sorry I’m such a mess and making a bigger mess of things. I’m sorry I keep hurting you when I mean to do the opposite. I’m sorry for being an utter disaster_.

“Right,” says Aaron, when Robert’s silence has said plenty for him.

Between one blink and the next, Aaron is up the stairs, the slam of their bedroom door reverberating like a gunshot inside Robert’s skull.

  
  
  
  
  


Robert is startled by the hand on his shoulder. He’s sat at the dining table when everything starts coming back into focus, but he doesn’t remember ever sitting down. Everything is fuzzy, blurred around the edges, but the picture of Aaron’s twisted face is still crystal clear. “Aaron?” he mumbles, turning in the chair despite how heavy he feels.

It’s Liv, frowning down at him worriedly. “No, just me.” Without missing a beat, she adds, “You look like you’ve not slept in ages.”

He hasn’t, but Robert isn’t about to prove her right. The last thing he needs is for both her and Aaron to be on his case. Relentless, the pair of them. Rubbish at looking after themselves, but more keen than a dog with a bone when there’s someone else that needs looking after. Robert’s in no position to judge, but he isn’t priority one right now.

“What time is it?”

The familiar ache of being sat still for too long has an extra edge to it when he sits up a little straighter, the usual crack and pop of his neck and back less satisfying than normal.

“Just gone three.”

“Three?”

He unlocks his phone with clumsy fingers disbelievingly and has to blink a couple of times for the numbers to look a little less distorted. _03:09_ stares back at him mockingly. It should scare him, that he’s lost track of the better part of two hours, but all his sluggish brain can conjure up is how he’s been sat here uselessly, doing absolutely nothing when he’s meant to be doing everything but.

“I should head out.”

Liv’s frown deepens. “You what?”

Robert’s in the middle of searching for—something, he doesn’t remember—his keys, maybe—when footsteps sound from behind him and Aaron’s voice joins in. “Going somewhere?”

“Out,” Robert says, distracted, when what he should be saying is _sorry_. “I need to—” He needs to search for Rebecca, wherever the hell she is, because she isn’t dead, she can’t be dead, and if his own father can walk into flames for his mother, surely he can search for his son’s mother when no one else seems willing.

He means to say as much, but his tongue feels too thick for his mouth, too heavy, all _wrong_. The _whole room_ feels wrong, tilted on its axis, the lights too bright, the growing horror on Aaron’s face wrong, wrong, _wrong_.

The last thing Robert remembers before dropping like a ton of bricks is hands grabbing for him too little too late.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn’t have timed this closer if I tried. Writer’s block just be like that sometimes. Thank you to the ED writers for at least validating the root cause as this heads its merry way to canon divergence.

It’s a blank space, what comes after. This big black void of nothingness inside his head.

Liv fills him in before the doctors get a chance to, when he’s finally awake properly, just on the right side of coherent to digest more than a few words. She says words like _fit_ and _concussion_ and _not getting enough rest_ , and he can’t help the way his eyes flicker over to Aaron when she wrings her hands and tells him in a quiet voice that he’d given them a right scare. If she looks shaken to the core, Aaron looks about a hundred times worse.

Robert wonders where he’d fall on that scale, if he looks worse off than the both of them combined.

“Hey,” Robert says gently, grabbing hold of her hands. Her mouth remains a hard line, but she doesn’t draw her hands back. It feels like forgiveness for a sorry that’s to come, if only just a little. “I’m okay.” That earns him a disbelieving look, so much like Aaron that he has to bite back a smile. “I’m not right now,” he admits, and deliberately ignores the bitter _clearly_ at the back of his head. “But I will be.”

He thinks. He hopes.

The chasm between him and Aaron looms unpleasantly when Robert chances another glance in Aaron’s direction. The few feet between them seems like miles and miles, and somehow that hurts worse than all of Robert’s aches put together.

Because this is everything Robert has been trying like hell to avoid: Aaron refusing to meet his eyes, resolute, angry, _hurt_. It feels like being stuck in a loop, where he loses when he puts his own selfish needs first and still loses when he puts other people there instead. Trying to search for Lachlan, for Belle, for answers, he’d run Belle over instead, no matter that she’d thanked him in the end for saving her life. Trying to spare Aaron pain, he’d caused him more in the long run.

 _Poison_ , Lachlan had called him once.

Liv looks knowingly between the two of them, wiser than any GSCE exam will ever measure, eyes lingering on Aaron before she makes a show of rising to her feet. “Right. I’m going to head down, grab a bite or summat. Might give Sarah a visit.”

When she’s left them to it, Robert swallows down the worst of his guilt and manages a pitiful, “I’m sorry.” He doesn’t elaborate. He’s not sure he has the energy to, and the list of things he’s sorry for is long and growing longer, still, even now. Especially now.

Aaron shakes his head. “I’m not after an apology.”

“No,” Robert agrees quietly, “but you still deserve one.”

It feels like ages before Aaron meets his eyes, but he does, finally, _finally_ , and Robert sags with relief. Aaron is a lifeline to cling to, whispered reassurances in a sea of guilt, unwavering love in a storm of self-loathing, the one sure thing when everything else is up in the air. Robert doesn’t know what he’d do without him, is glad he doesn’t have to dwell on it.

“I am, you know?” he says, wanting at least this to be clear to Aaron before he inevitably nods off. “Sorry.”

Aaron is silent for a long time, but he folds Robert’s hand between both of his and presses a kiss to the back of it. “I know.”

  
  
  
  
  


If Aaron hovers, keeping close more than normal, Robert owes him enough to not comment.

  
  
  
  
  


It’s like the clock winds back two years, only this time ‘round it’s him anxious to get out of a hospital bed, and it’s wedding planning he dives head-first into instead of the shock of ice cold water. The end goal remains the same: a ring on Aaron’s finger, all the promises of forever that come with it. That’s what he’d been after then, and it’s what he’s after now.

It is.

It isn’t a lie when he tells Aaron he wants to make things official.

It isn’t a lie when he brings up Seb, even if he leaves out how Seb will need someone to look after him if anything happens to Robert and Rebecca really is dead, to make the decisions they can’t be around for.

It isn’t a lie—technicality, but it isn’t—when he bottles it and doesn’t admit how scared he is by something he can’t remember, in part _because_ he can’t remember.

The last time Robert had lost a huge chunk of time, a bullet had ripped into his chest and sent him plunging into darkness. All he has as mementos are a scar, fragmented memories—the phantom feeling of hands he’d later learned were Aaron’s, distorted voices, flashes of lights and faces he couldn’t place—and the drop of his stomach after a nightmare or an unexpected bang he hasn’t braced himself for.

History keeps repeating itself in new and creative ways like a running joke Robert wants no part of.

He knows about the fit, of course, but just like the shooting, everything is secondhand. From the doctors and their big words, how they’d stressed the subject of head injuries and needing proper rest to avoid future hospital stays. From Liv’s recollection of shaking limbs and the whites of his eyes and how absolutely _wrecked_ Aaron had looked, seeing Robert in such a state. From the five words Aaron has had to say about it after refusing to speak about it altogether, which spoke volumes on its own—this wretched _I couldn’t handle losing you_ , confessed into the dark of their bedroom.

The elephant in the room, Liv calls it. It’s massive and impossible to ignore, harder yet to walk around, but he and Aaron have been managing, somehow. They have practice, ignoring things they ought to be talking about, he supposes. It’s blown up in their faces more than once, has already gone catastrophic this time around, and Robert doesn’t want a repeat, but he can’t bring himself to push Aaron to talk when Robert worries, irrationally, that at any moment it will happen again.

Speaking about it won’t speak it back into existence, but—

The doctors had signed off on a clean bill of health, and it should be enough, but—

 _But_.

That there’s a but at all is what eats at him.

_But his hands still shake._

_But he’s scared_.

And more, still:

Seb has the both of them, but Robert having his parents didn’t make the loss of Pat sting any less, or the looks of unwanted pity any better.

They’re a proper little family in everything but blood, but there isn’t proof of it yet, even if a piece of paper is rubbish compared to Aaron’s word.

Seb isn’t Robert, not yet an orphan, not yet ruined by circumstances beyond his control, but in just the first year of his life he’d nearly lost his father and then his mother and now could have lost his mother for real, born into families plagued by rotten luck.

But, but, _but_.

One after the other.

Lined up like dominos ready to topple over.

  
  
  
  
  


The word _poison_ lingers like a bad cold.

If not him, maybe the Sugden name.

Cursed, his family. Doomed to failed marriages. Maybe that’s why marrying into the family meant getting burned.

Their father had watched two wives be sent to premature graves, one of them burned literally.

Katie dead, maybe twice as doomed as the rest for having loved two; Adam on the run like Andy; Chrissie, smarter than the rest, divorced and free of Sugdens, but maybe equally as doomed as Katie for ever welcoming two into her life, hanging by a thread and then slipping away—the apple hadn’t fallen from the tree.

Diane is the exception, but he’s had everything rehashed to him: the health scares, the affairs, the split. He wonders if she’d been spared because of his father’s death and clings to her a little tighter the next time she goes for a hug.

He locks it away and doesn’t think about it again.

  
  
  
  
  


They find themselves at the Pavilion with a couple of beers, no lavish picnic in tow, or spontaneous plans to give their wedding night another go in sight, though Robert has half a mind to crack a joke about it despite everything.

The quiet is a welcome break from the bustle of activity and unwanted gossip in the village, because even with so much unspoken between them, Aaron knows him like the back of his hand.

Robert fiddles with the rim of his bottle to occupy his hands, expecting the admission even less than Aaron.

“I’m scared.”

His mouth and his brain feel disconnected, but maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising. The liquid courage helps, but he’s not nearly drunk enough to blame it on the beer, not when he’s felt disconnected from his own body ever since the seizure.

“Terrified, really.”

It’s a speck of dirt in a landslide, but it’s a start, isn’t it?

Aaron blows out a long breath, shoulders tense, seemingly steeling himself for something as he settles next to Robert on the step. “I panicked,” he says, and swallows audibly. “You just—you collapsed and I completely panicked. She hasn’t said it, but Liv did everything. Called for the ambo, timed the fit, talked _me_ down when it should have been the other way around. I saw you lying there and I couldn’t think straight.”

Robert thinks back to the scrapyard, to the lake, Aaron a dead weight in his arms, practically lifeless. “I know the feeling.”

“I keep thinking about when we were in that car,” says Aaron, because they’re too alike, sometimes. “When I was waiting for you to wake up, I just kept thinking about how brilliant you were, getting us both out. You saved my life, and I couldn’t even keep it together long enough to dial three numbers.”

“You did, though,” Robert insists, desperate to will away Aaron’s guilt. He barely has a handle of his own, but for Aaron, he would readily shoulder more. Without question. “When you found me and Liv. You came home to something out of a nightmare, but you phoned for help the second you knew something was wrong.”

The sunlight reflects just so off Aaron’s ring, and maybe Chas or Liv could have guessed it when he’d shown up sopping wet, but it’s the first time he confesses it out loud. It’s the first time he’s confessing a lot of things.

“I went back for the ring to avoid the thought of losing you, mind. I’d hardly call that brilliant.”

Aaron laughs. It’s wet and startled and the single best thing Robert has heard in weeks. “Right pair, the two of us.”

Yeah. Yeah, they are. Robert is glad for it.

“I reckon we’re doing Liv’s head in.” The smile he flashes feels wobbly even to him, but it’s the first time he’s actually wanted to smile. That must count for something. He knows Aaron counts for a lot. “We’ll be okay, won’t we?”

Aaron lifts his arm and urges Robert closer, all warmth and sureness and a pillar of strength Robert allows himself to lean on for a change. “We’ve got a wedding to look forward to, don’t we? No chance I’ll let you do a runner on me.”

It’s easy to rest his head on Aaron’s shoulder, tucked under his arm like this. “Like I’d run from the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Aaron presses his smile to the crown of Robert’s head. “You’ve got me. I don’t know what’s going to happen, and it might not all be good, but we’ll deal with it together.”

The arm around him squeezes tight like another promise.

“Together,” Robert agrees.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m on [Tumblr](https://sarahsugdenjr.tumblr.com) if you are!


End file.
